A few days ago I received an interesting email. The person told me she enjoyed reading my articles but had some problems with her eyesight. She asked if I might add a voice option to make it easier for her to read.

While I believe in accessibility, I have to admit, was news to me.

She sent me a couple of links to free services that could do it. I tried the top one and now have the voice button at the top of most of my articles.

The website it came from is called websitevoice.com 

It was fast and easy to set up by adding a plugin to my website and then choosing the voice. I won’t go into any instructions as to how you do it because the website has simple steps to follow so you are better to have a look. (This sounds like an ad, but I really have no affiliation with this company.)

I chose a female American voice, simply because her voice is deeper (like mine) and I liked her sound better than the Australian or British voices when I listened to the demo.

The diction and cadence is not perfect. But it is not robotic. You can listen by pressing the black audio button on the top left.

Give it a try.

World Sight Day is a good time to audit your online documents for accessibility

October 12, 2017, was World Sight Day. Developed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2000, World Sight Day aims to raise awareness about blindness and vision impairment for VISION 2020: The Right to Sight, a global initiative.

According to the research described by Dr Norman Doidge in his book, The Brain that Changes Itself, those without sight can use hearing and touch to activate the visual part of the brain. Remarkably, the study also found that by the visual cortex was much more strongly activated for the blind subjects as for those who could see.

Internationally-recognised disability services expert, Trevor Allan, says that adapting services for unsighted people is becoming more and more important around the world.

“Accessibility is a human rights issue,” said Mr Allan. “Why shouldn’t an unsighted person be able to access the same financial, technology and information services that others take for granted.”

All Australian Government agencies are now required to ensure information and services are provided in a non-discriminatory accessible manner, under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992.

“When it comes to electronic material, an unsighted person can access information by using what is known as assistive technology such as a screen reader, text-to-voice technology, and braille devices,” said Mr Allan.

“Best practice is to ensure that information and communication services are set up for that technology.”

Highlands resident, Danielle Spinks-Earl, is a communications and marketing consultant who believes many organisations don’t understand how important accessibility is or how to achieve it.

“There is a large amount of information in the public domain that is not set up to be accessible for those who are using assistive technology,” said Ms Spinks-Earl.

“For example, many people know that an alternative text field is for adding a description of an image, but often it is left blank in a website or document, or it says ‘image’. For an unsighted person, this is like opening a family photo album and seeing page after page of blank squares and the word ‘image’.

Danielle Spinks-Earl has sought the advice of Trevor Allan, who is based in Wollongong, in developing interactive PDFs for government and international clients.

“Good design is inclusive. Every organisation—large and small—can do this,” said Ms Spinks-Earl. “If it’s going to be publicly available, make sure it’s accessible.”

More information about World Sight Day 17 is available here: http://worldsightday.org.au/

Wild food by Juleigh Robins

 Tucked into a heavy shelf of thick cookery, travel and psychology books, it was the colour (a browny-beetroot) and the loose cursive script ‘Wild Food’ that drew me over.

The cover is nice at first glance, beautiful on the second.

The tart/tort/pie in short focus is bright with splotches of raspberry red in the crisp foreground and pitted with baked-in browny beetroot in the back. The plate it sits on is turquoise blue and dusted with icing sugar.

The title’s lettering is fat and flowing—a secondary salival trigger. The author’s name (replete with unconventional spelling ‘Juleigh’ with good mouth feel) is balanced and exquisitely tucked into the space the eye will naturally move into after absorbing those tasty crumbs.

The subtitle is what appears to be Adobe Garamond: 100 recipes using Australian ingredients. This is a well-crafted serif and one of my favourite typefaces of all time, and the favourite also of my good friend, Dave Eggers. (He may not have heard of me.)

Turn the page to the inside cover and here we go. The dust jacket is the same beety colour. Now I should tell you here and now that I have tried to determine the exact colour values of this elusive blend for years. Many years.

I have identified Pantone 209, at some stage, and various shades with differing C, M , Y and K values, and altogether dissimilar RBG.

The deception lies in its inconsistency. Differing times of day, differing paper stocks and finishes, differing screen monitors, sizes and devices—all of these change the appearance of this most volatile vermillion.

But this is the one.

It’s easy to make this colour go brown, unintentionally, but when it’s the perfect balance of magenta and cyan—and like a fine oil on a neutral-tasting square of bread, it needs the right stock to carry it—it is sublime.

The jacket copy is white, Adobe Garamond, of course. But the lead paragraph of three is larger (perhaps 14 points and italicised as opposed to 12 points and regular) and the three are each ‘wildly’ left justified with one single hyphenation toward the bottom. Like the Royal Botanic Gardens in Christchurch, New Zealand, this finely tuned wildness.

The inside cover artwork spreads across the 60 millimetre plus interior. It’s a tableau of excess, hedony and accidents. There are spills, smears and splatters of claret, garnet berries, sweet blood sugar, wine drops, mauvey with age.

t looks just like the lampshade my two-year-old created for my birthday. I don’t mean that to sound wry or derogatory. It’s just that it really does look very much like the lampshade my two-year-old created that is in our lounge room. Compare pictures of both.

Glimpse above or below the artwork and you’ll see that sneaky companion colour, the opposite of the spectrum and what a treat—it’s the icy cool turquoise blue. What a palette!

The subject of the book is wild food in Australia so the colour palette has to reflex that. It does with deep reds, olives and ochres, sage, forest greens and juicy dark berry colours.co

The section identities use a natural dry brush over two inches on the right panel to showcase the wild, script ingredient, picking up a colour that’s sampled from the food. The dry brush is repeated on the overleaf left sidebar but shrinks to a discreet one centimetre.

The book’s generous margination of a bottom and sides white space of 15 mills, with 20 mills on top, makes it feel luxurious, like a clean and minimal Hyatt room.

Wild Food is published by Lantern, an imprint of Penguin, and written by Juleigh Robin with Ian Robin as a consultant.

Is it just me or are you seeing this everywhere too?

Why, even Photoshop Channels panel uses something similar

Circular logos using gradients.

They look good, I admit. And I may even be guilty of designing one myself.

Here in Australia, a few of the more common examples are Opal Card, our new transport ticketing system, and the AAP logo.

Similar, don’t you think? I guess the main differences are the white space shape left in the middle. For AAP (Australian Associated Press) this is a triangle.

For Opal, the white space is a diamond. I think Opal is the more elegant of the two. The soft serifs on the P, A and L also reflect the smooth corners of the diamond white space.

By the way, here’s a pretty similar version I found on a collection site. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting anyone has breached copyright here. When a good idea gets going, people get onto it. Graphic design works in trends like this. As long as it’s sufficiently original, and registered, you’re okay.

Even Shutterstock and iStock are selling nice where do-it-yourself designers can buy and customise an eps file to create their own.

How you can make one

Oh, and here’s a tutorial about how you can make the Opal Card logo (below). It’s by the illustrious Abduzeedo.

But if you have Illustrator, it is fairly easy. Just make sure you change it a bit so it doesn’t look exactly like something else.

The Opal Card logo is very similar, but it doesn’t have the wedge of pink at the top right, nor does it use yellow in its colour pallette. Opal sticks to a simple four colour scheme of orange, red, blue and green.

Also the circles have been set further apart making the ring look thicker and the diamond in the centre look smaller.

What do you think? Spotted any logo trends lately?

Maybe it was the brewing storm, but when I was walking along Glebe Point Road the other night, this local bottle shop window art caught my eye.

This gorgeous piece of graphic design is the label of wine brand’s Rymill’s newest 2015 Cabernet Sauvignon, The Dark Horse.

Named in commemoration of Jane Rymill’s ex-Police horse, Adlai, a dark chestnut thoroughbred.

Right now, we’re at the end of racing season. Whether you like racing or not, this is a sport that commands premium brand sponsors and top shelf prices.

Why the label works so well

The graphic design concept is uncluttered. The message is clear.

It works psychologically because it also pays homage to Australia’s recent champion, Black Caviar.

I think this has been created with various Photoshop smoke brushes and an actual photograph of Adlai on a background layer. Although smoke brushes are often over-used at the moment, this is a perfectly appropriate example.

The background photo makes for an excellent guide as well as gives good definition. Look at the front of the horse where there is a lower level of opacity.

There is great definition in the front hooves, as the horse gallops away. The nose, chest and ears all have clean lines.

Can you see the hairs from the the chin and nostrils? There are even eyelashes.

Once you move past the legs and torso, the horse is just vapour, tendrils of speed. Yet, there is no clear-cut transition point from horse to apparition.

This is a design piece that masters the art of precise whimsy.

The classic Coonawarra typeface and the gold horses device convey power, freedom, and wild elegance.

I’ve always been a fan of well-used kerning and the nice spacing between the RYMILL letters and the Dark Horse brand name add understated sophistication. I’m guessing it probably isn’t Adobe Garamond — my all-time favourite typeface — but it’s very similar.

What’s it like to taste? If I didn’t have a two week old baby, I’d certainly be letting you know.

The wine retails for $23.95. I think it’s worth it to enjoy the artwork while savouring.

Kudos to the designer. A very handsome job.

The artwork promoting Glebe Street Fair and Newtown Festival are both standouts.

They make good case studies of what to do when you need to design something with a large amount of information.

Newtown Festival

The designer of this event has been given a lot of information to include on a simple promotional poster.

We have:

• Festival name
• Organiser (Newtown Neighbourhood Centre Inc)
• Key attractions (writers tent; market stalls; kids zone; dog show; live music)
• Entry by gold coin donation
• Sponsor logos

It could easily have been a mess. Instead, the designer has used a centred, vintage carnivalesque design with a simple colour palette of earthy and burnt orange, and a soft mint green as the highlight colour. The desaturated colours give the appropriate vintage look, which appeals to the local population.

The flags also communicate community, backyard, and low-key.

The featured image is the bicycle – a style popular in Newtown.

Through the use of layers, the designer has added the symbols of marquees and trees in orange with about 50 per cent opacity behind the bicycle.

All the logos, which need a solid colour background, have been placed at the bottom on the green park.

The use of th oval shaped park also adds visual interest. As does the green hanging pendant in the bottom layer. Do you see the white arrow the negative space makes above the bicycle?

If you looked at the bicycle first (I did), you then see an arrow indicating where to look next (the name of the event at the top).

Whether you notice them as a viewer or not is unimportant. The design subconsciously leads the eye to the important information.

Kudos to the designer, very nice job.

Glebe St Fair

Just like the Newtown Festival, Glebe St Fair designer has given a tonne of information to include in the poster design.

Instead of chunky boxes everywhere, they have used a sky theme and a retro design. Again, a simple colour pallette of blue and black makes it a very elegant design piece.

It has made the simple banner box ‘Glebe St Fair’ an oddly shaped rhombus, which draws attention. The clouds creeping over the borders also break up the consistency of the rectangle, making it more noticeable.

The blue bird sitting up top on the word Fair might encourage Tweeting but also conveys that this is a community fair, involving everyone.

The web address and ’34 years’ are communicated through the vintage plane’s ribbon sky trail. The plane becomes part of the design, flying over towards the signpost that indicates all the selling points of the fair.

 Event Design Lessons

1.  Decide on a theme that helps convey the spirit of the event. Use elements of the theme to add visual interest as well as showcase important features.
2. Stick with a simple colour palette.
3. Be aware of where the eye will lead. Lines can guide the viewer where to look.
4. Put logos on a solid background (e.g. black, white, or another colour). Gradients and changing tones will contravene most logo style guides.
5. Use layers so that the artwork looks more dimensionally, rather than flat.
6. Trust your intuition.

I recently had a chance encounter with a group of Chinese students from Shanghai studying English in Sydney.

I asked them what their favourite Australian brand was.

I expected them to say Weetbix or Cricket Australia. Vegemite, even the ABC, perhaps.

“Yoojiji,” was the answer I received.

“Yoojeejee?”

“Yoojiji!”

The entire group agreed. Yoojeejee was the class’s favourite Australian brand in China.

There must have been some confusion. How can the favourite Australian brand be one I have never even heard of.

“That sounds Japanese,” I said.  “Are you sure it’s Australian?”

“Very famous Australian brand. Yoojiji!”

I felt like an idiot for a moment. Then, duh. U.G.G.

The humble Ugg boot is known as an acronym.

UGG is renowned for its very high quality. China loves Australian wool.

Cultural cringe aside, UGG has done well to position itself as a quality Australian brand in a highly quality conscious Chinese market. And the Australian branding of the Pitt Street, Sydney store seems to reflect those brand attributes and appeals to the Chinese tourist market.

As you probably know, Coca-Cola has a product named Zero that’s heavily promoted around the world.

‘Getting to Zero’ is the strategy made by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

The vision is: Zero new infections. Zero discrimination. Zero AIDS-related deaths.

In my mind, Coca-Cola scored a victory with this one.

Whether this decision was made with Coke in mind or not isn’t clear. But let’s remember, Coke is the world’s number one brand. It has deep pockets and its needs to activate and reactivate the brand are endless.

World AIDS Campaign Africa Director, Linda Mafu, says,

“The potential for creative, connected and meaningful campaigning is really exciting.”

This is why I think it’s a good fit.

Youth and Music

Coke’s target audience is young people.  It is a youth brand. Generations come and go, but Coke always targets young people.

Why not middle-aged drinkers or kids? It’s well known that if you can capture a market young, you stand a good chance of retaining that loyalty for a long time. A child consumer becomes an adult consumer. There’s no need to target the other generations. f you make it relevant for young people, it’s always relevant.

Coke has long used the power of music to add emotion to its brand.

They say that the music you love as a teenager stays with you as music you love for the rest of your life. Something to do with the body’s hormones and first sexual experiences that I won’t go into.

Here, Coke is inviting the world to share the “sound of an AIDS-free generation.”

By using music, Coke says it aims to target teenagers with this campaign. Music is powerful. Everyone would have felt music’s visceral ability to lift a heart, churn a gut, evoke a tear.

As such, the Coke AIDS campaign has used a William Orbit remix of Queen to seed the new vanguard.

Social Marketing

Coke is smartly tapping into all the emotion, struggle, celebrity and profile of this disease, in much the same way as beer or fast food brands tap into similar attributes of sports competitions.
And if anyone likes a social cause, it’s the millennials. That means high shareability.

The strategy states in its foreward that the fight against HIV “serves as a beacon of global solidarity.”

It also wins on the ‘global’ criteria for a Coke sponsorship.

Brand War

In 2012, Coca-Cola enlisted as a partner of the (RED) campaign, together with other brands such as Nike, Girl, Bank of America, American Express and Converse.

The campaign’s tagline is “Fighting For An AIDS Free Generation”.

The (RED) manifesto states: “Every Generation is known for something. Let’s be the one to deliver an AIDS FREE GENERATION.”

Pepsi used to run with the tagline, ‘the next generation’ Remember the Michael Jackson TVCs?

Now Coke is flying the campaign flag “share the sound of an AIDS free generation” making the Pepsi’s old tagline seem meaningless in comparison.

Flaws

One downside of the campaign is the sheer number of different articulations coming from various AIDS organisations around the world.

It’s such a common problem. Organisations clamour for attention and then try and say too many things at the same time. They need to stick with one message. I suppose it’s not uncommon, but it is a problem. No one can remember a twenty-word campaign name. No one remembers passive sentences and weak verbs like ‘reducing’ or ‘supporting’. We like Zero! It states the vision in no uncertain terms.

All of the others are long-worded and fail on simplicity and memorability. They may be more accurate, but they’re not marketable. At least ‘Zero’ is easy to remember. And for Coca-Cola, that means consumers may just as likely think of a can of Coke Zero than reducing HIV.